Inheritors of the Roman Empire
The era of the '''Inheritors of the Roman Empire' lasted from about 476 AD until 565 AD. It began with the ousting of the last Western Roman Emperor, Romulus Augustulus, by a Germanic warlord. It then ended with the reign of Justinian the Great, whose achievements bear witness to the outstanding quality of Eastern Roman civilization prior to the disastrous Roman-Persian War and the rise of Islam. There were in effect three inheritors of the Roman Empire. The first were the so-called ''Barbarian Kingdoms'' formed by the various Germanic peoples, among which there lie the origins of the first nations of modern Europe, though in 476 they did not occupy areas that looked much like later states. These fell clearly into four major and distinctive groups. The northernmost, the Anglo-Saxons were moving into Roman Britain from the 5th-century onwards, and occupying the fertile plains of what is now England, fringed by a Celtic world consisting of Wales, Cornwall, Ireland, and Scotland. Across the Channel, Gaul lay at first in the shadow of various Germanic peoples, until the Frank's under Clovis put together a great realm encompassing almost all of modern France, as well as Belgium, Holland, and western parts of Germany; in the long run, the Franks were to have a bigger impact on the shaping of medieval Europe than any other barbarian people. In the west Clovis had left the Visigoths virtually confined to Spain, where they gradually established a somewhat precarious hold of the whole peninsula. Meanwhile in Italy, the old centre of the Roman world, the Ostrogothic king Theodoric fought off other Germans to rule, but proved just the first in a kaleidoscope of invaders. Modern scholars tend to avoid the term "Dark Ages" for this period due to its dismissive and judgemental connotations, but we must be careful not to understate the scale of political, economic, and cultural collapse in Western Europe. Yet out of this confusion there began to appear entities no longer simply a collection of barbarian warbands, but peoples belonging to a recognisable state, speaking a Latin vernacular with Germanic words added to it, engaging in the politics of land, and an emerging class of warrior-aristocracy. In due course, something quite new and immeasurably more creative than Rome would eventually emerge. The second heir was the eastern half of the Roman Empire which would continue for another thousand years, though henceforth traditionally referred to as the Byzantine Empire, somewhat unhelpfully. The Eastern Emperors had not looked upon the events in the West with indifference, but troubles in their own domains hamstrung them until the accession of Justinian the Great. His reign heralded a military revival, bringing all of Italy, Vandal North Africa, and part of Visigothic Spain once more under imperial rule. We labour under the handicap of knowing it did not last, so Justinian can seem something of a failure. But he behaved as people thought a Roman Emperor should, reuniting and restoring the old empire; after-all for a long time no one could conceive a world without it. His other achievements, particularly his legal work and the magnificent Hagia Sophia, were remarkable by the standards of any leader in history. His successors however could not maintain his legacy in the face of a devastating outbreak of Bubonic plague, renewed barbarian pressure on the Danube, Persia rumbling towards a chronic and exhausting war, and in the 7th century, a new predatory rival, Islam. A terrible time lay ahead. And the third heir to the Roman Empire was the Christian Church itself, through which Latin learning, and classical civilisation was to be preserved. In many places it was the sole institutional survivor of empire, west of Constantinople, although Church leaders were at first slow to recognise the opportunity in disaster. Bishops were men with experience of administration, lettered men among a new unlettered ruling-elite, and semi-pagan kings took them seriously as local political leaders; naturally new tasks were thrust upon them. Gradually over the next 500 years the papacy in Rome began its rise to the splendid preeminence that would later be taken for granted in the medieval world. History Western Collapse The centuries immediately following the fall of the Western Empire have traditionally been referred to as the "Dark Ages". The term originated in the 1330s with the Italian humanist Petrarch (d. 1374), who regarded the entire Middle Ages (476-1453) as dark, compared to the light of Classical Antiquity and the Renaissance. As the accomplishments of the era came to be better understood in the 18th-century, historians began restricting the term to the Early Middle Ages (476-978). Most modern scholars now avoid it altogether due to its dismissive and judgemental connotations. Yet the era remains the subject of a lot of historical controversy, with historians tending to divide into "catastrophists" who see the utter collapse of a civilisation, and "continuists" who question how much actually changed, for instance Roger Collins who said, "The fall of the Roman Empire in the West was not the disappearance of a civilisation. It was merely the breakdown of a governmental apparatus that could no longer be sustained". If there is a consensus, then it would be a mix of both, but tending more towards the "catastrophists". While "Dark Ages" is out-dated, we must be careful not to understate the scale of political, economic, and cultural collapse in Western Europe; Europeans are not some sort of depressed class needing historical rehabilitation. A more primitive, more war-like, more illiterate, and more rural era was ushered in. London and Paris would long remain fetid firetraps with barely 25,000 inhabitants, and even the greatest of European kings was barely more than a warlord to whom men clung for protection; or in fear of something worse. Until the 11th-century, Western Europe was an almost insignificant backwater of world history. One important thing to be clear about at the outset is that the Early Middle Ages were very different outside Western Europe. Roman civilisation continued almost without interruption in the east; the Byzantine Empire was changed by the collapse of the West, but it was still Rome. The coming of Islam would meanwhile remake the Middle East and Mediterranean, where the achievements on Classical Antiquity were not only preserved, but Arab scholars were able to forge new advances in many fields under the Abbasid Caliphate. Uncomfortable as the idea might be for some, the Islamic world perhaps contributed as much as the Church to bringing Western Europe out of the Dark Ages. At the same time China was having its own Golden Age under the Tang Dynasty. By the 11th-century, there was so much trade in China that coins couldn't be minted fast enough, leading to the world's first experiments with paper-money. In the Germanic invasions of the Western Roman Empire lie the origins of the first nations of modern Europe, though the barbarian peoples did not occupy areas that looked much like later states. There is some debate about how "barbarian" the different Gremanic peoples were by this time. Most had spent some time in Roman provinces before establishing independent kingdoms, and had served in the legions or alongside them as mercenaries. They often wore Roman military style clothing, and intermarried with the Roman populations they conquered and ruled. Except in the northern most provinces, they were also Christians of a sort. The 4th and 5th centuries were a major period of religious disagreement, with different groups arguing over the nature of God and accusing each other of heresy; the barbarians had almost all been converted to Arian Christianity, considered a heresy by the mainstream Church. This Romanisation made accommodation easier, and local Roman elites quickly came to terms with their new Germanic rulers, entering their courts and helping them govern in as Roman a way as possible. While the Germanic Kingdoms were to varying degrees Romanised, society was long and irreversibly shaped by a barbarian past. The little we know of these peoples before they entered the empire reveals a settled society rather than nomadic, farming somewhat and more often raising cattle. They were also skilled at iron-working. While there was a substantial peasant element, the elites of society were warriors divided into a rigid hierarchy of ranks; overlords to sub-chieftains to warlords to clans. Bonds of family were very important, as were acts of personal bravery and honour. They also had an exacting standard of manliness, often having multiple wives and no tolerance of homosexuality. Of formal culture, they brought nothing with them to compare with antiquity. In almost all the Barbarian Kingdoms, Germanic customs left their imprint. The first significant shift was that the Germanic peoples did not call themselves "Romans". Although it seems an obvious point, this was a radical change from barbarian warlords of the past like Stilicho or Ricimer, who wanted to rule as Romans. Germanic elites clearly saw themselves as distinct from the Romans they conquered and ruled, and it was the Roman population who assimilated in time, seeing themselves as Visigoths or Franks in a political sense. The second significant shift was towards a simpler economy in which the possession of land became the supreme determinator of social status. Like the provincial elites they were now dominating, the new Germanic military-aristocracy wanted to be landowners. This in turn meant that it became less and less necessary to pay the now landed army, and taxation regimes could eventually shrivel away; when Justinian reconquered North Africa and Italy, he found that reestablishing the Byzantine tax system was hard and unpopular. The barbarian kings instead relied on the revenues from their own lands, which were very extensive everywhere. Another result was that society became increasingly localised in outlook, commerce in general decreased precipitously, and by about 700 inter-regional exchange was very simple indeed; restricted to luxury goods such as wine. Roman coinage was sometimes replaced by coins minted with the faces of Germanic kings, but until 1000 there was not much coin about, especially of smaller denominations. Barter replaced money and a money economy emerged again only slowly. The third significant shift was that slavery gradually disappeared throughout Western Europe. It had not been generally practiced in Germanic society, except occasionally as punishment for crimes. As early as 658, the Franks abolished the practice of trading Christian slaves; Queen Balthild, the wife of Clovis II (639-658), had herself been enslaved as a young girl. Instead, the output of an appropriate number of peasants must underwrite the expenses of the military-aristocracy, and slavery slowly transitioned into serfdom. And the last significant shift was that public assemblies of the entire political community were an important feature of all the post-Roman kingdoms; royal justice for example was invariably done publicly, "in common council with us" as a Lombard king put it. This was not a late Roman concept; indeed such public assembles could be found in Celtic, Slav and Scandinavian societies, as much as in Germanic ones. Public assemblies would weaken after about 1000, but the idea of a legitimising community would remain potent, and still echoes today in the parliamentary bodies that are so characteristic of modern states. which was pessimistic; he thought the Frankish rulers had behaved so badly that their kingdom was doomed.]] We can thus already glimpse many of the key features that would characterise the Feudal System of medieval Europe. In this structure there begins to appear Barbarian Kingdoms no longer a collection of barbarian warbands, but peoples belonging to a recognisable state, speaking a Latin vernacular with Germanic words added to it, and with an emerging class of landed warrior-aristocracy. Out of this confusion of Germanic and Roman traditions something quite new and immeasurably more creative than Rome would emerge in due course. One step along the journey to civilisation was law codes, which almost all the kingdoms moved towards codifying and writing down; one of the earliest examples was the Burgundian Code (516). The characteristic Germanic device for securing public order was the blood feud. Men, women, cattle, and property of all kinds had in a most literal sense their price, known by various names such as "Wergeld". Wrongs done were settled by compensation, or if not forthcoming by the involvement of a whole clan. Written law codes were for future consultation rather than some form of publication. There's no point imagining devices such as the stone pillars of Hammurabi or Ashoka, since literacy was so rare; the Roman education system had been one of the first things to disappear. In comparison with instruments like the Code of Justinian (534), Germanic legislation were extremely narrow in scope, dealing almost exclusively with crime, marriage, and inheritance. Another step on the journey to civilisation was the emergence of interpretations of the barbarian role in history. The most famous examples are the History of the Franks by Gregory of Tours (d. 594) and the Ecclesiastical History of the English People by ''the Venerable Bede (d. 735). In them the Germanic peoples sought to reconcile traditions in which paganism was still strong, with Christianity and with the idea of Rome itself. Christian Church In the West, the Christian Church was in many places the sole institutional survivor of the Roman Empire. The network of bishops that the Romans established throughout the provinces had been important in the late Empire, but it was in the Early Middle Ages that they really became major political players. The cities remained of course, and in a simpler economy became even more a focus of political. As the Roman civilian administration crumbled, it was invariably the bishops who stepped into the power vacuum to represent the urban elites; they were in most cases from leading local families. Semi-pagan kings and other royal officials looked upon bishops with superstitious awe, and took them seriously as local political leaders. The Church was also rich in land donated by the faithful, thus bishops were on a social par with the Germanic ruling-class. And finally, bishops were men with experience of administration, and lettered men among a new unlettered ruling-class which craved the reassurance of sharing the classical heritage. Naturally, new tasks were thrust upon them. For the next thousand years, the most senior advisors of kings throughout Europe would often be clergymen. The Church and its leaders did not at first recognise the opportunity in the chaos between a civilisation which had collapsed, and one just being born; they identified themselves with what was collapsing. Two institutions that had emerged in recent years would be a lifeline for the Church in these dangerous rapids. The first was Christian '''monastacism', a phenomenon that had first appeared in the East. It was in about 285 that St. Anthony (d. 356) left civilisation behind to live a hermit’s life in the Egyptian desert. His example was emulated by others, with some of them drawing themselves together into communities. This new form of spirituality spread throughout Christendom over the next century. In a crumbling society such as 5th-century Western Europe, the monastic ideals of withdrawal from civilisation into undistracted service to God was attractive to many men and women of character and intellect. The institution prospered, and many of the greatest churchmen of the age were monks. One of the most influential men in the Church’s history was an Italian monk of whom we know little except his achievement; St. Benedict. In 529 he established a monastery at Monte Cassino in southern Italy, and gave it a set of rules for his monks to follow. The success of Benedictine monasteries was demonstrated by its rapid spread everywhere in the West, becoming a key sources of missionaries for the conversion of pagan England, Germany, and beyond. Monasteries furthermore served as a crucial conduit for the preservation of Greco-Roman learning and literature, to be rediscovered by later generations during the Renaissance. The Church’s other new great support was what would become the papacy in Rome. Within the Roman Empire, the Church had adopted the same organisational structure as the Empire itself: archbishoprics corresponded to the imperial territorial divisions, with the bishop of the most important city overseeing the dioceses. Among them, five came to hold a special preeminence: the archbishops of the great cities of Rome, Constantinople, Jerusalem, Antioch, and Alexandria. The prestige of St Peter’s See gave the archbishop of Rome a higher eminence still, but the early Church was a loose fellowship rather than a rigid hierarchy; Rome seen as simply the first-among-equals. With the fall of the Western Empire, the circumstances arose for the papacy to begin its rise to the splendid preeminence that would be taken for granted in the medieval world. To begin with there was the city itself; Rome had been seen for centuries as the capital of the world. Even more important was the fact that Rome was the only great bishoprics in the West, and the only one outside the Byzantine Empire. Bishops of cities throughout Christendom had long resisted claims of primacy by the five great bishoprics, but in a world turned upside-down by pagan or heretical barbarians, the Western bishops became more willing to accept Rome’s claim; there would gradually emerge a true hierarchy in the West with the papacy at the top. The pope in whom the future medieval papacy is most clearly revealed is Pope Gregory the Great (590-604). He was the first pope to come from a monastic background, thus bringing together the two great institutional supports of the early Church. Significantly, Gregory did not speak Greek; nor did he feel he needed to. He was the first pope to fully accepted the barbarian Europe in which he reigned. He reasserted papal authority over the bishops of Spain and France, re-energised missionary work sending men like St. Augustine to pagan England in 595, and oversaw the realignment of the Barbarian Kingdoms away from the Arian heresy. He reigned in the wake of the Lombard invasions of 568 when the civil administration was almost nonexistent, so increasingly assumed temporal control over the city of Rome; the roots of the later Papal State. Furthermore, Gregory resented interference in the Church from Constantinople, as much as he resented it from barbarian kings, thus beginning the subtle shift of the West Church towards a self-conscious independence. Meanwhile the 4th and 5th centuries had been a major period of religious disagreement, with different groups arguing and accusing each other of heresy. For the most part these quarrels revolved around the mystery at the very heart of the faith, the nature of God; how to reconcile Jesus' dual nature, both divine and human, and yet one person; and how God, Jesus and the Holy Spirit related to one another. Concepts such as the Trinity, "one God in three Divine Persons", were only very gradually accepted as the most satisfactory answer. In our secular age, it is difficult for us to fully comprehend the theological minutia of these early Church disagreements. It requires an effort to comprehend that behind these theological differences lay a concern of appalling importance, nothing less than that mankind should be saved from damnation; they could affect world history just as powerfully as the movements of armies. In the late-5th-century, mainstream Christianity contended with three prominent heresies; or at least they were called heresy by the side that won. The first was called Arianism after the Libyan priest Arius (d. 336), and was prominent in the west. It asserted that Christ was distinct from God and therefore subordinate to Him. Arianism was deemed a heresy by the mainstream Church at the Council of Nicaea (325), presided over by Emperor Constantine himself, and suppressed throughout the Roman Empire. But Arian missionary work had already enjoyed great success among many of the Germanic peoples; the Visigoths, Burgundians, Vandals, Ostrogoths, and Lombards all converted to Arianism. The Germanic peoples seemed to cling to this heresy at least in part to maintain their cultural distinction from the Romans they had conquered and ruled; Arianism endure into the 7th-century with Garibald of the Lombards (d. 671) the last Arian king to reconcile with the mainstream Church. Another major heresy was prominent in the east, centred in Egypt, and became known as Monophysitism. It was a deliciously subtle disagreement about how the eternally divine Christ become incarnate as a transient man. Monophysitism provoked long-standing sociopolitical disruptions within the Byzantine Empire. Efforts by Constantinople to accommodate her religious minority would cause many of the early quarrels with the papacy in Rome, that ultimately ended in the Great Schism of 1054, permanently sundering Christendom into the Catholic Church and Eastern Orthodox Churches. All the territories where Monophysitism was prominent were ultimately conquered by the armies of Islam in the 7th-century, where it later matured into the Coptic Church that still exists today. The third heresy was the Celtic Church in Ireland, although strictly speaking this wasn't a theological heresy at all. The Celtic Church was isolated and cut-off from Rome, thus it's structure evolved differently; since Ireland had few town that could be called cities, there was no tradition of bishops, and instead the basis of the Church was the great monasteries. This ultimately played a part in the Norman invasion of Ireland in 1175, which Pope Adrian IV (d. 1159) authorised in order to bring Ireland into the Catholic fold. British Isles Britain was one of the first provinces to be abandoned by the Romans in 407. Of cultural continuity there is virtually no trace; Romano-British civilization disappeared more completely here than anywhere else in the Western Empire. Towns were abandoned, trade declined precipitously, and artisanal production beyond the village level ceased almost completely. Even the language was to go; a Germanic tongue almost completely replaced it. The Roman heritage of Britain was purely physical. It lay in the ruins of towns and villas, or the great constructions like Hadrian’s Wall, which people came to believe were the works of giants of superhuman power. Some of these relics, like the complex of baths built upon thermal springs at Bath, disappeared from sight completely for hundreds of years, only to be rediscovered in the 18th-century. Britain's post-Roman power vacuum did not go unnoticed. The Romano-British soon came under intense pressure from the Celtic Picts in the north, and seaborne raiders from north-western continental Europe. The native Britons even sent an appeal for help'' to the Western Emperor in 446, known as the ''Groans of the Britons; ''none was forthcoming. Chief among the pagan Germanic peoples where the Angles of Jutland (modern-day Denmark) and the Saxons (modern-day northern Germany) who had long raided the coasts and now began to settle in successive waves. It speaks for their success that the word "''England" derives from the Old English for "land of the Angles", the Welsh word for the English is Saeson (Saxon), and the term Anglo-Saxon is still today synonymous with someone who is ethnically English. By about 600, the fertile plains of what is now England were occupied by Anglo-Saxons, as well as others such as the Jutes. During the settlement period the lands ruled by the newcomers seem to have been fragmented into numerous tribal territories, but by the 7th century, these had coalesced through the usual processes of warfare, marriage and inheritance, into roughly seven stable kingdoms, often referred to as the Heptarchy. Anglo-Saxon England was meanwhile fringed by the Celtic world of Wales, Cornwall, Scotland, and Ireland. In the wake of the invasions, Romano-British Christianity, whatever it may have been, retreated to the misty fastnesses of mountainous Wales and isolated Cornwall. We may have a fleeting glimpse of the last spasms of resistance in the legend of King Arthur and his knights. According to the extremely sparse contemporary records, the advance of these more primitive and ferocious barbarians was briefly halt by a local warlord called Ambrosius Aurelianus at the Battle of Badon (c. 500); in the earliest version of the story, Arthur is associated with that battle. Wales and Cornwall had been among the least Romanised parts of the country, prized as a rich source of mineral resources more than anything else; there were a number of forts but only one significant town, Caerwent in South Wales. Although Latin had been the official language of Roman Britain, the people here tended to speak in Celtic tongues, early forms of Welsh and Cornish. In the 6th-century religious communities were founded all over Wales, with St David a key figure; today the patron saint of Wales. The Roman Empire had declined the challenge of conquering Ireland, but its impact had still been profound. Although Ireland's patron saint St Patrick (d. 461) gets all the credit, in the 4th and 5th centuries Ireland was Christianised by a host of missionaries based along commercial and cultural interactions. Along with faith came literacy, for the clergy developed a written form of the native Celtic tongue. Ireland was a patchwork of semi-barbarian petty-kingdoms and almost entirely non-urban. Thus the basic unit of church organization was not the bishopric, but the great monasteries at Clonmacnoise, Glendalough, Clonard, and Lismore, among others. While the 6th-century was an age of imperial and cultural collapse for most of Western Europe, for the Celtic Church in Ireland it was a Golden Age. Embracing the new Latin culture with a fervor typical of a new-comer, Irish monks excelled in the study of Latin and Greek philosophy and Christian theology; monks would arrived in Ireland from throughout continental Europe to learn pure Latin, unsullied by provincial vulgar Latin. The arts of manuscript illumination, metalworking, and sculpture flourished, producing such treasures as the Book of Kells and the many carved stone crosses that dot the "island of saints and scholars". One distinctive tradition of the Celtic Church was the popularity of "exile for Christ", a form of penance that took two main forms; either living a severe form of ascetic life on extremely isolated islands, or literally leaving one's homeland on missionary endeavours to convert (or be martyred by) the pagans. Irish missionaries would give the Celtic Church far-flung influence; St. Columbanus (d. 615) founded important monasteries as far away as Italy. Scotland’s most famous missionary was the Irish abbot, St. Columba (d. 597). At this time there were at least three indigenous peoples in the northern-most part of the British Isles: the Picts in the north and east, the Gaelic speaking Scots in the west, and Celtic Britons in the south. Columba founded the great monastery of Iona in the Inner Hebrides, and Christianity became popular with pagan kings as it seemed to offer them supernatural powers. There are many stories of miracles which Columba supposedly performed, the most famous being his encounter with what is today known as the Loch Ness monster. Meanwhile, when Christianity was gradually reintroduced into England by missions from another Rome, the papacy, Roman Christianity would find itself in conflict with Irish missionaries from the Celtic Church. The differences are slight and procedural, rather than weighty matters of doctrine. They concern such details as how a monk's head should be shaved, the lack of bishops since Ireland had no towns that could be called cities, and the correct way of calculating the date of Easter; the Roman Church had further separated itself from Judaism in 455 by moving to a solar calendar, while the Celtic Church retained the old lunar method of calculation. In 595, Pope Gregory the Great (d. 604) sent missionaries to England to revive the faith led by St. Augustine (d. 604). Although Kent was one of the smallest Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, it was there he had his first success; he was the first archbishop of Canterbury, still today the most senior cleric in England apart from the monarch. Meanwhile, the most famous Irish missionary to England was St. Aidan (d. 651), who restored Christianity to Northumbria, travelled ceaselessly throughout northern and central England spreading the gospel, and still had time to found the great monastery at Lindisfarne. The underlying concern was meanwhile whether the English church should be subordinate to Rome. The issue was decided at the Synod of Whitby (664), where the king of Northumbria came down on the side of Rome; other Anglo-Saxon followed his example, as did those in Scottish, and Welsh. Under Archbishop Theodore of Canterbury (d. 690) the bishops of all the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms were united into a single hierarchy, and was from then on fully integrated into the rest of Western Europe. Ireland on the other hand retained the distinctive practices of the Celtic Church well into the 12th-century. This ultimately played a part in the Norman invasion of Ireland in 1175, which the pope authorised in order to bring Ireland into the mainstream fold. France, Germany and Spain Across the Channel, things were very different; much survived. When Roman authority finally crumbled, Gaul lay in the shadow of the Visigothic Kingdom (418-720), long established in Aquitaine. Their prominent role in repelling Attila the Hun in 451 gave them greater importance than ever, and they energetically extended their own territory over much of south-western France, as well as campaigning south of the Pyrenees; Spain was at first of secondary importance. Aside from the Visigoths, Gaul was shared by several Germanic kingdoms and a remnant of the Empire: in the north-east, the Franks were the dominant political and military power on both sides of the lower Rhine; in the south-east, the Burgundians were settled in the Rhône valley and the area running south-east to modern Geneva; another group, the Alemanni occupied Alsace on the upper Rhine, between the Franks and Burgundians; in the north-west, British migrants fleeing the Anglo-Saxon invasions had established themselves in Brittany; and in the north, a rump state of the Western Empire survived the fall as Roman Soissons (457-486). As is evident from the works of the writer Sidonius Apollinaris (d. 490), the economy and lifestyle of Gaul remained remarkably resilient, and the Gallo-Roman cultural legacy was bequeathed intact to the successor-kingdoms. Indeed, the Germans themselves were to varying degrees Romanized. This influence was strongest among the Visigoths and Burgundians, who had lived within the Empire for a longer time; both were Christians of a sort. Yet somewhat ironically, the Gallo-Roman population viewed the pagan Franks and Alemanni less harshly, since they had not been converted by the heretical Arian branch of Christianity. Of all the Germanic peoples, it was the Franks who would most profoundly shape medieval Europe: the name France comes from the Latin version of their name, Francia or “''the land of the Franks''”; the great Charlemagne (d. 814 AD) was a Frank; and the Chinese used the term "Frank" as a synonym for Western European as late as the 16th century. Prior to the great barbarian incursions of 406, the Franks were already settled on the Empire's borders in what is today Belgium and Holland. They had not raided Gaul substantially, but as Roman power collapsed they gradually expanded their power west of the River Rhine, taking the city of Tournai sometime in the 440s. The Franks were among the least Romanized of the Germanic peoples that conquered a slice of the Roman world in the 5th-century; they did not adopt Christianity, remaining polytheistic pagans. And they were by no means a unified whole, and up to the late 5th-century, there were many autonomous Frankish petty-kingdoms on both sides of the Rhine; these were based around cities such as Tournai, Cologne, and Cambrai, among others. The fortunes of the Franks began with Clovis I (481-511), who inherits the throne of the Frankish petty-kingdom of Tournai when he was only fifteen; the third ruler of a line descended from Merovech, who is said to have fought at the Battle of the Catalaunian Plains. Clovis was a typical Frank, a warrior-king. At the Battle of Soissons (486), he conquered the last Roman rump-state in northern Gaul, extending his lands west to the River Loire. This great victory allowed him to gradually unite all of the Franks under a single king for the first time, through an unscrupulous blend of warfare and intrigue. The next important step for the Franks was Clovis' marriage to a Burgundian princess. Unlike the rest of her people, she was a mainstream Christian, and Clovis embraced the faith himself. The story of his conversion follows a classic Christian pattern, involving victory on the battlefield over the Alemanni in the middle Rhine valley; traditionally said to have happened in 496. The battle was followed by the mass-baptism of Clovis and 3,000 of his warriors by the bishop of Reims. There was no doubt political motives for his conversion: it would be extremely beneficial in securing the loyalty of his Gallo-Roman subjects; gave him the support of the Christian Church itself, the most important institutional power still surviving from the Empire; and spared Gaul the lengthy religious conflicts that occurred in other Germanic kingdoms. It also inspired newfound religious zeal for Clovis' wars against the Arian Visigoths, whose ruler Alaric II (484–507) had been exiling bishops unwilling to cooperate with his heretical faith. Clovis routed and killed Alaric at the Battle of Vouille (507), sacked Visigothic cities, and effectively pushed them out of Gaul. Meanwhile, Clovis' marriage did not prevent him from demanding an annual tribute from the Burgundians; it would be completely annexed after his death in 534. His kingdom thus encompassed almost all of Roman Gaul, except for Brittany and a narrow strip along the Mediterranean coast retained by the Visigoths, as well as Belgium, Holland, and the western part of Germany. The Frankish capital was moved to Paris and Clovis was buried in the church he had built there, the first Frankish king not to be buried as a pagan barbarian. He is considered the founder of Merovingian Dynasty (457-752), and to the French people, also the founder of France. But this was not the start of the continuous history of France. On his death, Clovis’ kingdom was divided according to the Frankish custom among his four sons; a pattern that would be repeated in future reigns. Merovingian success nevertheless continued in subsequent generations; they kept other barbarians out of Gaul, established hegemony over wide tracts of central Germany, and took lands north of the Alps from Italy, profiting from the Ostrogothic invasion of 488. They were less successful in northern Germany, where they frequently fought against the Saxons; occasionally turning them into tribute payers, but never for long. Their system of divided inheritance nevertheless proved to be unstable in the long-term, and ultimately weakened the Merovingian kings. Divided inheritance was unusual in the post-Roman world, but all the Barbaric Kingdoms had their own idiosyncrasies; in Vandal north Africa for instance the oldest member of the royal family inherited the entire kingdom. The practice of primogeniture, the firstborn legitimate son inheriting the entire realm, only becoming widespread centuries later. Frankish rulers, brothers and cousins, were prone to quarrelling over ill-defined borders, and internecine civil wars were commonplace. The Frankish realm was reunited after a bloody struggle in 558, only to break-up again three years later. There was only one long period of unity, under Clotaire II (613-29) and his son Dagobert I (629-39), during the whole two centuries of the dynasty. Gradually the realms settled down in four relatively stable sub-kingdoms: Austrasia in the north-east with its capital at Metz; Neustria in the north-west with its capital at Soissons; Aquitaine in the south-west with its capital at Toulouse; and Burgundy in the south-east with its capital at Lyon. Even when Clotaire reestablish Frankish unity, he only united the kingdom, not its four royal courts. Each became the focus of politics and developed a distinct character; Austrasia and Neustria tended to quarrel with Burgundy often acting as peacemaker. The ultimate result of frequent warfare was that power seeped away from the Merovingian monarchs towards the warrior-nobility, upon whom they relied for military support. In the 8th-century, it was from the most powerful of these nobles that there emerged the Carolingian Dynasty, which would bring the Frankish realm to its peak under the great Charlemagne. When the Franks seize most of their territories in Gaul in 507, the Visigoths had not yet gained full control of Spain; another Germanic peoples, the Suebi, were already settled in the west and the ever-independent Basques clung-on in the north. The next half-century was difficult for them. Clovis had killed their king at Vouille, and the Visigothic nobility quarrelled so much over the succession that Byzantine rule was able to establish itself in the south from 552. The rule of the Visigoths - and there were not so very many of them, roughly 200,000 - with a penchant for long-hair and gaudy jewellery, over a Hispano-Roman population of the several million was precarious. Its rugged terrain where local loyalties were strong presented quite special problems, as it has continued to do to all invaders and governments; in the centuries to come, Muslim Spain would never be able to dislodge the Catholic kingdoms of the north. Furthermore, the Visigoths held to the Arian heresy, and thus fused much less with existing society than had the Franks. It was only under Liuvigild (569-86) that political unity was restored. He subdued nearly the entire peninsula by force, all except the Basquelands and the Byzantine coastal strip which held-out until the 620s. Liuvigild saw himself as a unifier in all respects. He issued a law code that contained the most Roman influenced legislation of any of the Barbarian Kingdom, and granted equal rights between the Visigothic and Hispano-Roman population. His son went a step further, renouncing Arianism and reconciled with mainstream Christianity, and the ethnic distinction between the two cultures effectively disappeared. The long tradition of Catholic monarchy in Spain thus began in 587. This newfound unity found expression in increasingly severe persecution of outsiders, especially the Jews, the only substantial religious minority left in Spain. Anti-Jewish laws became ever more unpleasant over the next century, and were easily the most severe anywhere in Europe until the 12th century. Everything seemed so serious to the Visigoths. They were never able to establish a stable dynasty, and the succession to the throne was rarely hereditary, which made them at best very tense. One turned violent in 710, and invited disaster; the Muslim conquest of Spain. Byzantine Empire (457-518 AD) By tradition the Eastern Roman Empire is henceforth referred to as the Byzantine Empire '(330-1453), supposedly founded by Constantine the Great. Yet few terms have such misleading connotations as "''Byzantine"; it derives from Byzantium, the former name of Constantinople. The Byzantines certainly wouldn't have recognised the term; they considered themselves Romans, the successors to the empire of Scipio Africanus, the empire of Julius Caesar, the empire of Trajan, and the empire of Diocletian. The terms came into use in the 16th-century and invokes all the prejudices of that time: in the midst of the Renaissance, Europeans were enamored with their Greco-Roman heritage, saw the whole medieval period as dark and barbaric, with the Byzantine Empire considered unworthy of the glorious name of “''Roman''”. At the same time it attempted to condone the often bitter historical rivalry between Western Europe and the Eastern Roman Empire. Centuries later authors were still writing in the same vein; here is a quote from William Lecky (d. 1903), "Of that Byzantine empire, the universal verdict of history is that it constitutes, without a single exception, the most thoroughly base and despicable form that civilization has yet assumed. There has been no other enduring civilization so absolutely destitute of all forms and elements of greatness, and none to which the epithet "mean" may be so emphatically applied ... The history of the empire is a monotonous story of the intrigues of priests, eunuchs, and women, of poisonings, of conspiracies, of uniform ingratitude.." Unfortunately this view persist in the popular imagination. The fall of the Western Empire certainly changed Constantinople, but the Romans had reinvented their empire numerous times; the Rome that went into the chaos of the Punic Wars, or the reign of Augustus, or the Crisis of the 3rd-Century, or the reign of Constantine the Great, was not the same Rome that came out, but it was still Rome. So too, the Byzantines were still Romans. It is futile to not to use the term, but we should remember that when Constantinople finally fell in 1453, it truly was the end of two thousand years of continuous Roman tradition. The Byzantine Empire had not seen the fall of the Western Empire with indifference, but troubles of their own hamstrung them in the 5th-century. The Eastern Emperors were dominated by their Germanic generals too. This began to change under Emperor Leo I (457-474), the first of a series of four capable rulers who would oversee the survival of the Eastern Empire. He was appointed by the Germanic general Aspar (d. 471) when the ineffectual Theodosian line finally ran-out of male heirs after almost a century. The new Emperor nevertheless soon chafed under Aspar's tutelage, and began seeking new allies. He found them in another influential group within the legions, the Isaurians. Isauria was a rugged isolated region in the mountains of central Anatolia (modern-day Turkey), with a reputation for war-like and barbarous folk; they had been conquered by the Republic way back in the 1st-century BC, but still retained their own political structure under chieftains. To secure the loyalty of its people, Leo married his daughter to their chieftain; the future Emperor Zeno. Leo's moment to strike came with the immensely costly fiasco of the attempted conquest of Vandal North Africa in 468. Aspar was tainted by the defeat, and he and his allies were summoned to the palace, where Leo had them all killed by palace guards, thus allowing the Isaurians to firmly supplant them in the legions. When Lea died three years later, he was succeeded by '''Zeno (474-491); he was regent for his own young son for the first year until his death. He had much to thank his step-father for breaking free of powerful Germanic generals; the Western Empire, faced with the same problem, was overthrown by the general Odoacer just two years into his reign. Zeno had no desire to allow this usurper to reign in Italy, but with his own throne still shaky could do nothing about it. He nevertheless came up with a brilliant solution. After revolting against the Huns, the Ostrogoths had settled on the Byzantine side of the Danube in the Balkans, alternating between supporting and revolting against Byzantine rule. In 488, Zeno convinced their brilliant leader Theodoric (d. 536) to enter his service against Odoacer. He would conquer Italy and rule it in the Eastern Emperor's name; the barbarians got a rich fertile land of their own, and Zeno got rid of the troublesome Goths forever. Over five years of fighting, Theodoric reduced Odovacar to Ravenna, which was put under siege in 493. Unable to take the city, a banquet was called to herald peace negotiations during which Theodoric killed Odovacar with his own hand. The Ostrogothic Kingdom of Italy (493-540) was thus establish in the former Western Empire's most prosperous province, both economically and culturally. For the next 33 years, Theodoric ruled both wisely and well, bringing a period of calm and stability to the troubled peninsula. He never deviates from his arrangement with Constantinople; "Our royalty is an imitation of yours, a copy of the only Empire on earth", he once wrote to the emperor in Constantinople from his capital in Ravenna. On his coins the only face was the emperor with the inscription, "Unvanquished Rome". The Ostrogoths largely kept themselves apart from the Roman population, a tendency reinforced by their heretical Arian faith. He continued to staff the civilian administration entirely with Romans. The army meanwhile remained the exclusive preserve of the Goths. Nevertheless, the arrangement suited everyone, including the papacy in Rome since Theodoric made no attempt to interfere in Church affairs; "We cannot order a religion, because no one can be forced to believe against his will." Roman education survived longer in Italy than anywhere else. It would reach it's last flowering with two of the key figures through whom the legacy of the Greco-Roman world passed to medieval Europe: Boethius (d. 530s) translated much of Plato and Aristotle into Latin, and Cassiodorus (d. 585) conceived of the concept of monks preserving classical culture. Theodoric was not blind to the fact that the rule of a barbarian in Italy was unacceptable to Constantinople in the longer term. He worked tirelessly to establish good relations with the other Barbarian Kingdoms; his daughters married a Visigothic king, a Burgundian prince, and a Vandal king, while he himself married the sister of King Clovis I of the the Franks. After Theoderic's death in 526, his achievements nevertheless began to collapse. His inadequate successors eventually invited the Byzantine invasion of Italy in 535 under Justinian the Great. Meanwhile in Constantinople, the 17-year reign of Zeno the Isaurian was stormy throughout, plagued by attempted coups and revolts; he was deposed by a usurper at one point, and it took him 20-months to recover his throne. For all his unpopularity, he left the Byzantine Empire more stable than he had found it, working tirelessly to strengthen the state. He spent his later years trying to solve one of the endemic religious controversies so common in Byzantine history; in this case reconciling the mainstream Church with the Monophysite heresy popular especially in Egypt. He was so spectacularly unsuccessful that it provoked a 35-year schism between the archbishops of Constantinople and Rome; an early step in the tragic relationship between the East and West that would end in the permanent breach of the Great Schism in 1054. Zeno's great legacy was not that the Empire prospered, but that it survived the fall of the West with the Byznantine army firmly under imperial control. On his death, it was left to his widow, the daughter of Leo I, to pick a successor. With the people of Constantinople crying "give the Empire an Orthodox Emperor, give the Empire a Roman Emperor", she chose the aged minister of finance, Anastasius (491-518), a native Byzantine of impeccable breeding. His ascension provoked a brief revolt among the Isaurians, but once this was suppressed, he proved himself an energetic reformer and an able administrator. He finally completed the monetary reforms started by Diocletian and Constantine, introducing new stable copper coinage; Constantine’s gold coin had only really benefited the very wealthy. This combined with a long reign during which the Empire was at peace, other than a brief war with Sassanid Persia (502–505), had a number of positive effects: it allowed the return of taxation based on hard currency rather than kind, making it much easier to track and crack-down on corruption; soldiers pay also returned to hard currency, which helped attract native Byzantines back to service in the legions; and middle-class merchants and commerce began to thrive again. His greatest contribution to the Empire was the huge treasury that he left for Justinian to exploit. Byzantines under Justinian (518-565 AD) After a 27 years reign, Anastasius died without an heir. It was the well-respected commander of the Praetorian Guard who was eventually chosen an the new Emperor, Justin I (518-527). As a career soldier with little knowledge of statecraft, Justin wisely surrounded himself with trusted advisor, most prominently his nephew and adopted son, the future Justinian the Great (527-565). Two years before his ascension to the throne, Justinian had somehow managed to persuade his uncle to allow his marriage to Theodora, a strong-willed woman of humble birth; a former actress and occasional courtesan. In 527, they became Emperor and Empress, sharing an almost equal role in running the state. And it was a most splendid reign, with an explosion of power, conquest, and culture. Justinian came to power full of energy, full of ideas, and full of confidence; his tireless work-ethic earned him the nickname, "the emperor who never sleeps". Nevertheless, early in his reign he nearly lost his throne during the Nika Riots (532). He aspired to restore the Roman Empire to its former glory, and imposed heavy taxes upon his subjects in order to fund his wars. Popular resentment finally boiled over after a minor incident at the chariot races in the Hippodrome. By the 6th-century, chariot racing played a dominant role in Byzantine society, inspiring fanatical enthusiasm, and fighting was commonplace between the supporters of the two teams of charioteers. When Justinian punished both factions after a violent clash, for the first time it united both sets of supporters in common cause; the tradition cries of the Hippodrome, "Nika, Nika!" (win, win!), were now directed against Justinian. For five days, rioters rampaged through Constantinople's streets, looting and burning every building they could force their way into. Justinian even contemplated fleeing his capital, but Theodora shamed him in to staying to fight it out, saying "the imperial purple makes a fine burial shroud". It took two full days for the imperial legions to finally restored order in the city. It had been the most violent riots in Constantinople's history; tens-of-thousands of people were left dead and nearly half the city was a smouldering ruins. But instead of seeing this as a disaster, the young emperor saw it as the perfect opportunity to cement his legacy in stone; rebuild the city on a grand scale. There are many examples of his building projects throughout Constantinople and the wider provinces, including two famous mosaics of Justinian and Theodora in Ravenna. But his crowning glory was the Basilica of the Hagia Sophia (Holy Wisdom). The design by the architects Isidore of Miletus and Anthemius of Tralles called for a structure unlike any other: a symphony of half-domes culminating in a square floor-plan formed by four great arches, that supported a massive circular dome 107 feet across. The inside was adorned throughout by gold mosaics, a high alter of solid-silver 50-feet-long encrusted with gold and precious stones, and all lit by innumerable gold lamps, leading one stunned observer to comment, "we knew not whether we were in heaven or earth, for on earth there is no such vision nor beauty, and we do not know how to describe it; we know only that there God dwells among men". The entire building was completed with triumphant skill in just 5-years, 10-months, and 4-days after the laying of the first stone; centuries later it would take about 100 years to build Notre-Dame de Paris. Hagia Sophia remained the largest cathedral in the world for nearly a thousand years, until the Cathedral of Saint Mary in Seville was completed in 1520. It is also said to have "changed the history of architecture". Meanwhile, Justinian was already busy with a new typically ambitious project, having befriended an extraordinary lawyer named Tribonian (d. 542). Roman law was a chaotic morass of a thousand years of confusing and often conflicting legal rulings. Together these two men set about a complete recodification of all aspects of Roman law, removing the obsolete and contradictory, and clarify what remained in clear, comprehensive, and concise terms; this was the Corpus Juris Civilis or Code of Justinian. It was published in three parts between 529 and 534, and continued to form the basis of the Empire's laws until its fall in the 15th century. The code went into effect in those areas regained under Justinian's wars of reconquest including Italy. It was nevertheless lost for centuries, until rediscovered in the 11th-century when the Christian Church was codifying Canon Law. From there it spread becoming the basis for legal systems throughout Western Europe, as well as Eastern Europe. As late as 1804, the legal thinking behind the Code of Justinian served as the backbone of the famous Napoleonic Code, the single largest legal reform of the modern age. Justinian was almost always at war. The story of his spectacular military achievements are really the story of his greatest general, Belisarius (d. 565); a man who historian Edward Gibbon called the Scipio Africanus of the Byzantine Empire. Belisarius was a natural leader of men, and his talents were quickly recognised; he was appointed supreme commander in the eastern provinces at just 25 years-old. Hostilities with Persia were rumbling once again after over a century of relative peace, when the power of the Sassanid kings revived, beginning with the reign of Kavadh I (498–531); this so-called Second Golden Age would last over a century until about 622. In 525, Persia lost control of Georgian Iberia, a buffer state to the north of Armenia, when its ruler switched his allegiance to the Romans, triggering the Byzantine-Persian War (526-532). In 530, Kavadh launched a massive attack on the important Roman fortress city of Dara on the upper Euphrates, but Belisarius demonstrated his brilliance winning a stunning victory over a much larger Sassanid force. The next year, the Sasanians attempted to turn the tide of the war by invading Syria, but Belisarius' rapid response foiled the plan, fighting them to a stalemate at the Battle of Callinicum (531) with heavy losses on both side. This led to the concluding of a new peace treaty in 532, an "Eternal Peace" for which the Byzantines were obliged to pay an annual tribute to Persia; it would last just eight years. With his eastern frontier secure, Justinian was ready to fulfill his greatest vision; the reconquest of the West. He dispatched Belisarius first to the Vandal Kingdom of north Africa; not only would this punish them for the sack of Rome in 455, but rid the Mediterranean of Vandal pirates. Victory in the Vandalic War (533-534) came with surprising ease. As long as their great king Genseric (d. 477) had ruled, the Vandal Kingdom was secure but after his death it declined swiftly. In an unusual system of succession, the elder of the ruling family ascended to the throne, and subsequent kings tended to lack vigour. Relations between the fiercely devoted to Arian Christian Vandal rulers and their mainstream Christina subjects were particularly poor; religious clashes were more intense in north Africa than in any of the other Barbarian Kingdoms. Belisarius sailed for North Africa with barely 16,000 men, but caught the Vandals completely off-guard, with much of their army away dealing with a revolt in Sardinia. Landing unopposed, Belisarius marched on Carthage, where he defeated the Vandals in battle just outside the city-walls and took the city; the Vandals had no answer to the Byzantine cavalry largely made up of Hunnish mercenaries. The Vandals did manage to regroup and fight on for another year, but the Vandal king was eventually forced to surrender; he was treated honourably and allowed to go into exile. The wealthy territory of north Africa, the former breadbasket of the Western Empire, thus became a Byzantine province, and remained so for over a century until the Muslim conquests of the late 7th-century. The recovery was incomplete, however: hostilities with the Moorish tribesmen of the desert interior would plague the new province for almost 15 years. The easy with which north Africa had been conquered, encouraged Justinian to press on to the ultimate goal of bringing Italy back under direct imperial rule. The Gothic War (535–554) would be long, costly, and ultimately futile. The Ostrogoths were popular with the people of Italy and friendly with the papacy in Rome. Technically the Goths were ruling Italy as Byzantine allies, but a pretext for war was soon found in the succession crises that followed the death of Theodoric in 526. With imperial resources now overstretched, Belisarius invaded Italy with barely 8,000 men. Nevertheless, the campaign certainly got off to a good start. He conquered Sicily with barely an effort. He then crossed over into the mainland, and conquered most of the south quickly, including the heavily fortified city of Naples. Still finding only sporadic resistance, Belisarius captured the crown jewel of Italy in December 536, Rome itself. Gaining Rome however was one thing, holding it was another. By this point the Ostrogoths had finally regrouped under a new king, and Belisarius soon found himself besieged within the city. It lasted one year and nine days, until reinforcements finally arrived from Constantinople to drive-off the attackers with heavy losses. The Ostrogothic Kingdom was on the verge of collapse, but this was as it turned-out was high-point of Belisarius' Italian campaign and indeed career. Back in Constantinople, Belisarius' stunning achievements had stoked the paranoia of Justinian and especially Theodora, who was distrustful of anyone potentially a threat to her husband's and her own status. In June 538, they dispatched another general to Italy to keep an eye on him, the eunuch Narses (d. 573). But this just hampered the campaign: Belisarius and Narses disagreed constantly, and the split command undermined Belisarius' authority with his subordinates. The ultimate result was capture and subequent loss of Milan, which was brutally sacked by the Ostrogoth in March 539; it had been the largest and richest city in Italy. This disaster did have one positive effect, convincing Justinian to recall Narses. Afterwards, Belisarius quickly consolidated his control of Italy, and by late 539 was besieging the Ostrogothic capital of Ravenna. In May 540 a land and naval blockade of the city finally convinced the Goths to negotiate, with Belisarius ultimately tricking the Ostrogothic king into surrendering. The Byzantine army occupied the city. The Italian war seemed at long last over, with only some final mopping-up to do. But that had to be left to other men, because Belisarius was urgently recalled to deal with a new threat in the east. With the war in Italy, the undermanned eastern frontier had proven too tempting for the Sassanids despite the annual tribute. Persia was now under Kavadh's son Khosrow I (531-79), the most celebrated of all the Sassanid rulers and a worthy match for Justinian. During his ambitious reign, Khosrow reformed the aging Sassanid administration into a strong centralised government, introduced a rational taxation system, and was a prolific builder of everything from roads to frontier defences. He broke the power of the great feudal lords, by creating Persia's first standing army under firm imperial control. In every way, Khosrow tried to increase the prosperity and welfare of his subjects: he founded a medical academy, introduced chess from India, and spurred a renaissance of the arts. His greatest achievement was a major expansion of the Academy of Gundeshapur, one of the most important centers of learning in world history, since it sought texts from all of its neighbours including Greek and Indian works. Khosrow's achievements would later pass to the Islamic world, and have a profound influence on their cultural, scholarly, and political life. Meanwhile in 540, Khosrow broke the "enternal peace", and began raiding Syria, sacking numerous important cities including Antioch, the third city of the empire, and triggering the Byzantine-Persian War (540-545). Belisarius had some success in the east, but the war effectively petered-out when a devastating outbreak of Bubonic plague swept through both empires. The Plague of Justinian (541–542) started in Egypt in 541, reached Constantinople the following spring, and then spread throughout the Mediterranean region. The disease penetrated neither northern Europe nor the countryside, which suggesting the black rats which kept close to the ports and ships were the primary carriers. In Constantinople, perhaps 40% of the city's population perished; some 300,000 people. Throughout the rest of the Mediterranean, nearly 25% of the populace died, with estimates ranging from 25-50 million people in total. The plague would come back repeatedly in different strains throughout the 6th, 7th and 8th centuries, with each outbreak becoming more localized and less virulent, until the last recurrence in 750. A pandemic on the scale of the Plague of Justinian did not appear again in Europe until the Black Death of the 14th century. Even Justinian himself was struck by the plague. Although he would later recover, with the Emperor seemingly on his deathbed, Theodora became acutely aware of her precarious grip on power. Her paranoia took over again, and she stripped Belisarius of his command; he spent more than a year in an undeserved disgrace. Belisarius would eventually be recalled as the situation in Italy took a dramatic turn for the worse. In his absence, a new leader had risen among the Ostrogoths, Totila (d. 552). At just 25 years-old, Totila proved both a skilled military leader and a screw politician, exploiting every opportunity available to him: war in the east and plague had wreaked havoc in the Byzantine army; and the introduction of heavy Byzantine taxes was resented by the Italian population especially the lower classes. The young conqueror's rise was as swift as it was complete, defeating every imperial army sent against him, and controlling virtually all of Italy by the summer of 543, including the great city of Naples which fell to a protracted siege. With only Rome, Ravenna, and Florence still in Byzantine hands, Justinian recalled Belisarius and sent him back to Italy. Nevertheless his second Italian campaigned was five long years of frustration. Still distrusted by Justinian, he was denied overall command and sufficient resources. It took all his typical genius just to hold onto those cities still left under imperial control. It the end, it fell to Belisarius' replacement and old nemesis, Narses, to finally secure the reconquest of Italy. With the Empire having recovered somewhat from the plague, Narses arrived in Italy with a massive army 35,000 strong in early 551. The Battle of Taginae (July 552) proved the decisive battle of the war; not only was the Ostrogothic army routed but Totila himself was slain. It was the end for the Ostrogothic Kingdom, though pockets of resistance held out for several more years. All of Italy was now back under imperial rule, albeit an Italy devastated by the imperial armies as it had never been by the barbarians; Rome itself was little more than a ruin having swapped hands five times during the course of the war. In the midst of the Italian war, Justinian had received even more good news; an appeal for assistance from a revolt in southern Spain against the Visigoths. He jumped at the chance and with just a few hundred men, established a Byzantine province around Córdoba that would last for more than a half-century. There was one other significant effect of Justinian's wars; the imperial fleets now reigned supreme throughout the Mediterranean, and for the next century it was be once again be a "Roman lake". Near the end of his life, Justinian withdrew more and more from public affairs, while occupying himself in a futile attempt to reconcile the eastern and western Churches, as well as the mainstream Church with the Monophysite heresy. He died of a heart attack in 565 after 38-years on the throne; he was 83 years old. With the benefit of hindsight, Justinian's reign can seem something of a failure. His conquests, great as they were, did not last. By 572 most of Italy was lost again to barbarians, this time the Lombards, with Byzantine holdings reduced to those coastal cities that could be supplied by the imperial fleet. Byzantine Spain held-out a little longer until 624, when it was reconquered by the Visigoths. Regardless, Justinian the Great behaved as people thought a strong Roman Emperor would, reuniting and restoring the old Empire; after-all no one could conceive a world without it. On his death, people thought the Empire stood on the brink of a new and glorious age, where it would regain and even surpass all of its former glory. But his successors could not maintain Justinian’s legacy in the face of barbarian pressure on the Danube, Persia rumbling towards a chronic and inevitable war, and in the 7th century, a new rival, Islam. A terrible time lay ahead. Category:Historical Periods